Blog Archives

KPMG: 2023 UK retail sector trends & forecast

At the start of March, Paul Martin (Global Retail Lead & UK Head of Retail at KPMG) kindly joined me for a video interview to talk about the trends of the UK retail sector since we last discussed the topic in early 2022. In this interview, Paul and I looked back at how the UK retail sector fared in 2022, amid a number of unique market challenges. We also discussed the main category movements witnessed so far in 2023, and provided a forecast for the next 12 months of trading!

Watch the full interview below:

Key Takeaways

2022 Recap:

Following a positive 2021 Christmas period, 2022 started strongly for the UK retail sector, resulting in some of the best trading results KPMG had ever seen for January/ early February!

Content writing tips For ecommerce brands

Over time, Google, and other search engines have provided increased visibility for websites that offer their users ‘valuable’ or ‘good’ content. If you have an amazing product, but the content on the website fails to highlight its benefits, you’re not likely to achieve that all important sale. Great content can provide users with the information they need in order to aid them through their customer journey and increase conversions.

So what is ‘good’ content, and how can we go about writing content that search engines, and more importantly, your users will love? In this article we’ve put together some unforgettable tips on how to write great ecommerce content, to take your ecommerce website to that next level.

A complete guide to optimising your website architecture for SEO

Your website architecture should be an essential part of your technical SEO strategy. Whether you’re working in-house or agency side, the content on your (or your client’s) website must have the foundations of a well-organised categorisation, by topic, in order for the content to be easily discovered, landed on and browsed by both search engines and users.

Moreover, focusing a part of your overall strategy on optimising your website architecture will actually also cover many of your other technical SEO efforts, such as effective internal linking, ease of crawlability and indexation by search engines and accurate keyword targeting. To name a few. So you’re actually covering a lot of your bases with just a single approach. Therefore, this SEO investment should most certainly not be overlooked.

It is for this reason that we’ve prepared this guide on how to optimise your website architecture for SEO. But before we get into the important steps and best practices, we need to first understand a few things, such as what a website architecture is and how it benefits a user’s experience on your site.

What Is Top of Funnel Content?

Before we look at what top of funnel content is, we first need to look at the wider marketing funnel as a whole. A marketing funnel is a visual representation of how businesses can turn strangers into customers.

A marketing funnel can be split into 3 main stages: Awareness, Consideration and Conversion.

Top of funnel content sits in the awareness stage as it’s designed to attract and engage new customers with a brand and its products.

Users would read top of funnel content to gain awareness and understanding of a topic, product or service, and to find solutions to their problems or needs at the beginning of their decision-making process.

In the given hypothetical example, a customer is looking for a garden office building to improve productivity while working from home. At this stage, they might not be aware of the various types of garden buildings available, the features they offer, or even how a garden building can improve their productivity. This is where top of funnel content comes in.

A garden building website can create articles that provide useful information and educate the customer about the benefits of garden buildings, particularly garden office buildings, in improving productivity.

Some example content ideas in this scenario can include

Google algorithm updates: the past, the present & the future

These days, it seems like Google releases a significant algorithm update every two minutes. The SERPs always change, SEO professionals are constantly scrambling to figure out what’s going on, and Google continues to wheel out the “just make better content” statement each time.

So, what is actually happening? Where do we go from here? And does each page need to be precisely 2,146 words with a 3% keyword density and 14 DA 50 or above links to rank?

In this blog, we’ll go through a selection of Google’s major algorithm updates over the years, break down the key trends and use that information to try to figure out what those mischievous devs up in Google Towers will do next.

Google’s early years

During Google’s early years, algorithm updates were a rare event rather than part of the constant cycle we have now. There would be one or two updates to the SERPs a year followed by months of silence. Between 2003 and 2010 we got just six updates:

Florida (2003)
Jagger (2005)
Big Daddy (2005)
Vince (2009)
Caffeine (2009)
MayDay (2010)

2003’s Florida was the first big Google update and the first sign of what was to come over the next few years. Tactics such as keyword stuffing, hidden text and hidden links were targeted, and we saw the state of the SERPs change dramatically overnight.

This was followed over the next few years by a handful of updates designed to contribute continuous small improvements –

How To Get the Most Out of Attending An Ecommerce Conference

Attending eCommerce conferences are one of the best ways to keep up with eCommerce trends, emerging technologies, and smart techniques to get more customers to visit your online store. But if you’re going to an eCommerce event, don’t make the mistake of just sitting back and listening. Attending conferences provides a unique opportunity to learn, network, grow and debate while also having your specific questions and issues answered by panels of experts.

And this is why it’s so important to make a plan to get the most out of attending an eCommerce conference,

Going into a conference with no plan of action can leave you feeling deflated afterwards. Coming away feeling like you didn’t learn everything you wanted or that you missed networking opportunities because you were too tired can make it feel like a missed opportunity. So let’s get an action plan sorted!

5 Ecommerce SEO speakers to look out for in 2023

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a top priority for every eCommerce professional today. But with an endless jungle of information to navigate through, and guidelines that seem to change in the blink of an eye, a little guidance goes a long way when looking to optimise your eCommerce site for traffic and visibility. And this is why it’s so helpful to hear from expert SEO speakers, who understand how to elevate eCommerce brands.

Whether you’re looking for a helping hand to guide you through the SEO process, a nudge in the right direction, or you simply want to stay in the loop with what’s going on in the industry, hearing from established experts gives you a shortcut to all the latest insights and learning. We have compiled a list of notable and emerging eCommerce/SEO speakers to keep an eye out for this year to help you get started, with a focus on upcoming events in the UK.

How to handle faceted navigation for search engines

Filters and faceted navigation are one of the most intuitive ways for visitors to your eCommerce website to narrow down through potentially thousands of goods. But using filters can also cause a lot of headaches from an SEO perspective. Without the right handling, faceted navigation can cause a whole host of issues for websites – crawl bloat, duplicated content, and thin content too, which can all lead to traffic loss.

Let’s look in more detail at what faceted navigation is, and how to use it without undermining all your hard SEO work!

What is faceted navigation?

Introducing Re:commerce – our 1-day SEO conference

We’re delighted to announce that on 10th March next year, we are running a 1-day eCommerce SEO conference in London!

This will be hosted at the stunning Ham Yard Hotel, and we’ve been working very hard to secure what is an incredible line-up of 15 speakers, 5 breakout session leaders, 4 moderators, 1 emcee and a partridge in a pear tree…

I genuinely believe we’ve curated the conference line-up of our dreams, and we’re very proud to share this with you.

Keynote speakers:

Rory Sutherland: I first saw Rory speak live at an A4U Affiliate Marketing event about 12 years ago. I’m showing my age a little here… At the time, it was the best talk I’ve even seen live, he was captivating. It still hasn’t been topped yet!

How to Analyse Brand & Non-Brand Organic Traffic

Reporting on organic traffic is one of the most fundamental metrics in SEO. It is one of the key indicators on how your site is performing and informs the recommendations that are a part of your overall strategy. However, one of the most basic missing elements to our traffic data is how much of our organic performance is based on queries that are brand related or from non-brand related terms.

This guide will show you:

How to extract search Google Search Console query data directly into Google Sheets using the Search Analytics for Sheets extension
Segment the data into brand and non-branded traffic
Present the data in a way that is most useful to you and your clients.

Knowing how much of our traffic is brand or non-branded can be essential in deciding your SEO strategy moving forward. If there is too much reliance on branded keywords then your site is missing out on the significant opportunities in search volume that non-branded keywords have to offer. But, while this may seem obvious and common knowledge, we may not be privy to this data for various reasons. One of the main reasons could be is we don’t have the necessary tool, or process, to segment organic traffic into brand and non-brand.

There is Google Search Console which is available to all site owners and SEOs. You could use GSC to download your query data and then filter it into brand and non-brand. But, the downside to this platform is that you are only able to extract data up to 1,000 rows.

However, an alternative tool that is also accessible to everyone is the Search Analytics for Sheets extension for Google Sheets. The main difference this tool provides compared to Google Search Console is you are able to extract data well beyond the 1,000 query limit. Moreover, the data loads directly into Google Sheets. So no more having to export the data as a CSV and then loading it into Sheets and then formatting it to your liking. This is especially frustrating when you have a large amount of data, which could take a considerable amount of time to load.

Therefore, it is for these reasons that the Search Analytics for Sheets extension is an ideal choice for any SEO looking for a free tool to use to segment their traffic into brand and non-brand. Besides this tool, all you need is Google Sheets itself, with the use of a few nifty formulas to highlight the total branded and non-branded share. (You can find all the formulas in our free template, as part of our guide, here) And with this data you can then begin to pull beneficial insights to inform your SEO strategy and recommendations.

Category: Blog